No Hero in 1811, Street Grid’s Father Was Showered With Produce, Not Praise

John Randel Jr., the secretary, surveyor and chief engineer for New York City’s street commissioners, was hardly the most popular public servant of his day.

Beginning in 1808, Randel and his colleagues were pelted with artichokes and cabbages; arrested by the sheriff for trespassing (and often bailed out by Richard Varick, a former mayor); sued for damages after pruning trees; and attacked by dogs sicced on them by property owners irate at the prospect of streets’ being plowed through their properties (“many of whose descendants have been made rich thereby,” Randel noted later).

Randel had the unenviable task of meticulously drafting and executing the street grid plan for Manhattan, which, the commissioners concluded, “appeared to be the best; or, in other and more popular terms, attended with the least inconvenience.”

Randel had quite a commute. Nearly every morning beginning in 1808, he would walk north from downtown, jauntily navigating a wooden plank over the ditch that cut through Lispenard’s salt meadow. He would hike past Aaron Burr’s former country home at Richmond Hill, acknowledge Thomas Paine, a decanter of rum or brandy nearby, reading at the first-floor window of his house on what became Bleecker Street, and finally arrive at his office on Christopher Street in the village of Greenwich.

Photo

A portrait of John Randel Jr. by an unknown artist.

The surveyors fought their way though forests, shrubs and briars “impassible without the aid of an ax.”

In March 1811, Randel submitted three hand-drawn manuscript surveys, each nearly nine feet long — “a work of genius,” said Thomas G. Lannon, an assistant curator of the New York Public Library, which holds one of the originals. Randel spent the next 10 years staking out and marking the intersections from First Street to 155th Street with 1,549 three-foot-high marble monuments and, when the ground was too rocky, with 98 iron bolts secured by lead. (He had to resurvey 30 miles after vandals or disgruntled property owners removed the markers.) He also charted the terrain to the northern tip of Manhattan to produce his “farm map,” of 92 sheets filling four volumes that together would measure 11 by 50 feet.

Taking precise measurements with instruments he invented (a 50-foot iron ruler expands 0.0003585 feet with each degree of temperature, he concluded), he filled more than 40 leather books with field notes (the notebooks, at the New-York Historical Society, also include a recipe for Irish butter). As a mathematician and future surveyor for canals and railroads, he had a vision that was usually linear.

Randel was born in Albany around 1787. Little is known about his early years, but he became a protégé of Simeon De Witt, surveyor general of New York State and one of the three street commissioners. Randel was as meticulous in his accounting as in his surveying — his notebooks include a $12 invoice for a horse. And while another commissioner, Gouverneur Morris, described him as “being more ambitious of accuracy than profit,” he could also be prickly and litigious.

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John Randell's field notes at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. Randell spent 10 years staking out the intersections he had mapped from First to 155th Street.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Randel was furious when the commissioners hired another surveyor, William Bridges, to publish their first engraved grid map. (Not only did Bridges’s version omit Randel’s name — which appears three times on his own map — but, Randel said, it also left out 58 structures and nipped the width of the island by 200 feet.)

Randel embellished his original map in 1814, but it was not published until 1821 because he feared that the British, who had just burned Washington, might use it to attack New York.

Four years later, he was fired as chief engineer for the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company. He sued for wrongful dismissal and, after being denounced by another engineer as a “lying nincompoop,” collected a staggering settlement of $226,886.84 (more than $5 million in today’s dollars). He and his wife bought a 1,000-acre estate in Maryland that he called Randelia.

His dreams for Manhattan were undiminished, though. In 1846, he was among the first to propose an elevated railway on Broadway (he produced a $4,000 model weighing three tons) that would extend uptown to a new leafy suburb north of 155th Street.

Randel’s 1811 survey, though, is what put him on the map. In 1864, a year before he died, Randel recalled the grid as “the pride and boast of the city,” a blueprint that afforded “safety from conflagration, beautiful uniformity and convenience” and “greatly enhanced the value of real estate.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2011, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: No Hero in 1811, Street Grid’s Father Was Showered With Produce, Not Praise. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe